Caught a part of this in the car last night and found it totally fascinating.  He makes some very notable remarks about the direction of broader American evangelicalism.  The full transcript is available at the link below.

http://www.wbur.org/npr/128776382

Fresh Air from WHYY

Ousted Evangelical Reflects On Faith, Future

LISTEN NOW

July 28, 2010 9:25 AM

For 10 years, the Rev. Richard Cizik was the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents roughly 30 million constituents across the United States.

But he was forced out of that position in December 2008, after remarks he made on Fresh Air about his support of gay civil unions, among other things.

On Wednesday, Cizik returned to Fresh Air to discuss how his life has changed since he left the association and why he started a new group called the Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, which he hopes will be an alternative to Christian groups that focus on the culture wars.

Cizik says he has no regrets about what happened to him after appearing on the show.

“In so many ways, this has been good for me,” he tells Terry Gross, adding that his support of same-sex civil unions wasn’t the only reason he was asked to leave the NAE.

“It was a sum total of everything [I said on Fresh Air],” Cizik explains. “It was speaking out on behalf of creation care, climate change, a broader agenda — speaking out on a host of levels that just offended the old guard. Civil unions, well that was just one part of it.”

Cizik says that he still strongly believes that same-sex couples should be allowed to obtain civil unions.

“While I haven’t come to a conclusion on [gay marriage], I am convinced that you can’t deny rights to people based on their sexual orientation. It’s wrong,” he says. “It’s even wrong, I think, as Christians to take that position. Because we should support human rights for all people even when they don’t agree with us.”

He also explains how he believes the evangelical movement has changed in the past several decades — and why he believes the evangelical movement is overdue for another ideological shift.

“Most important, [we need to become] independent of partisanship and ideology rather than subservient to partisanship and ideology,” he says. “Evangelicalism [has] become so subservient to an ideology and to a political party that it needs, as I say, to be born again.”

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Interview Highlights

On his comments about same-sex marriage on Fresh Air that forced him to resign from his position at the National Association of Evangelicals

“It came out of the depths of the heart the mouth speaks and so it just came out. I hadn’t planned on saying it, but I had been thinking about it a long time. And that’s because I had been looking at constitutional arguments that are now being weighed by the California Supreme Court. In other words, can we deny rights to others whose rights we don’t especially share? Or, in fact, may disagree with strongly? And yet, yes I agree with what I said then and I agree with it now. What’s changed since then — even over the last year — according to a poll released just this week by Public Religion Research Institute, is that a majority of evangelicals — not just younger evangelicals — say that they agree either with same-sex marriage or civil unions. That’s a majority of white evangelicals in California. And evangelicals around the country are looking at this in new light and new ways and evaluating this in terms of the Constitution and in light of our Christian values. And that’s good.”

On being asked to resign

“We have an evangelical saying that goes like this: ‘When God closes one door, he opens another.’ Well, absolutely right, I found out about that. But [God] doesn’t say anything about catching your fingers in the doorjamb as you leave. What I’d say to people who have been sacked, fired or whatever — don’t get your fingers caught in the doorjamb while leaving. In other words, don’t try to pull yourself back in. … But God is bigger than those events that precipitate your departure from that job. I’m not the only only who lost my job in recent days, weeks, years. So recognize it as an opportunity and see how God is going to help you in the future.”

On how evangelicalism has changed

“It became perceived by millions and millions of Americans as captive to a conservative ideology. Not captive to Jesus or to the Gospel but captive to an ideology that has departed, in so many ways, from historic evangelicalism. The movement has always been a reactionary movement. It was born out of reaction to the 19th century biblical criticism in biology in which evangelicals reacted to that and moved away. The new evangelicals of the 20th century saw the fallacy of that kind of approach towards society but after a number of decades, that kind of neo-evangelicalism that was founded by the National Association of Evangelicals — well it’s fallen back into the same kind of subservience to reactionary-ism. Evangelicalism is [seen] today by what it’s against, not what it’s for. And we’re trying to say, we’re for these things. And among those is this command to first and foremost follow Jesus — not the Republican Party or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else, but to follow what the Gospel says.”

On the Tea Party movement

“The Tea Party movement is irreligious and significantly so. It’s got lots of problems. I wouldn’t join it if I were an evangelical and I would urge others not to or at least to be suspicious of it because it doesn’t bring with it the whole biblical concept of responsibility and the rest to God and so I’m not a Tea Party fan.”

On religious imperialism

“[Religious leaders across the world] look upon our advocacy on behalf of religious freedom as intervention. And they resent that. And so we really have to be careful when engaging overseas that we understand how these pivotal players in these religious communities view us. And not attempt to manipulate them but understand their importance. … And we just can’t view religion through the lens of counterterrorism policy. We have to understand that religions play pivotal roles on all of these issues of poverty, development, disease and the like. Even climate change. And we have to engage these players.”

Related Links

• Rev. Richard Cizik On God And Global Warming

Jim Belcher was at Gordon College (his alma mater) on Monday from 7-9 PM to talk about his book Deep Church (thedeepchurch.com).  I boot-legged the audio from  midway up the lecture hall.  Audio is below.

Here is the blurb:

WENHAM, MA—Jim Belcher graduated from Gordon College in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in political studies. Today, he is an experienced pastor and scholar whose wisdom has been widely recognized through his award-winning book, Deep Church.

Belcher, the founding pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, will return to campus, Monday, July 19, from 7–9 p.m. for, “A Conversation with Rev. Dr. Jim Belcher.” His talk will take place in the Jenks Library, room 237 with a reception immediately following. Sponsored by the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations, the event will be free and open to the public.

Chosen as one of Christianity Today magazine’s Top 12 Books of 2010, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional explores the emerging movement in evangelical churches as well as traditional models and offers insights of all sides to forge a third way between the two. Deep Church is a term taken from a letter C.S. Lewis wrote in 1952 to the Church Times to describe the body of believers committed to mere Christianity.

“This book is written for those on the outside who want to understand the debate,” Belcher writes in his book’s introduction. “But this book is also written for . . . those who are attempting to work out their ecclesiology—their theological view of the church, its purpose, structure and goals.”

Belcher, who earned his M.A. from Fuller Seminary and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, is also the co-founder of the Restoring Community Conference: Integrating Social Interaction, Sacred Space and Beauty in the 21st Century, an annual conference for city officials, planners, builders and architects. He previously led the Twenty-Something Fellowship and co-founded The Warehouse Service at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena. He has been published several articles, and until recently, he and his wife and four children live in Costa Mesa, California. Next year, Belcher and his family will live in Oxford, England, while he researches a new book.

“As an alumnus, Jim has given Christians good help and perspective on understanding and making decisions about their church connection,” said Nancy Mering, director of alumni and parent relations and organizer of the event. “I’m very excited he can speak to folk in the Gordon community and neighborhood. It’s great to have him back.”

http://www.gordon.edu/article.cfm?iArticleID=986&iReferrerPageID=5&iPrevCatID=30&bLive=1

My wife loves Susan Wise Bauer, so I perked up when I saw her name on the front page of “Books and Culture”.  Her book review was on “In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church“.  This is a fascinating account of a secular Jew pretending to  convert to an evangelical Christian in order to learn what makes them tick.  The author, Gina Welch, did this undercover work at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA (pastored by the late Jerry Falwell).  One wonders if she will do this for other churches or religious groups.

It appears that Susan thinks that Gina missed the point of evangelicalism and mistook it for a mere cultural identity.

The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/amongevangelicals.html

Undercover Among the Evangelicals

They’re nice, but they don’t know how to think.

Susan Wise Bauer | posted 6/28/2010

In 2005, Gina Welch put on ugly buckled loafers and a loose purple sweater and joined Thomas Road Baptist Church. She also grew out her short hair, gained some weight (her “temporary church body”), and replaced her gold nail polish with “good girl pink.” The dowdiness was strategic: she was trying to look evangelical.

Welch, a self-described secular Jew, had moved to Virginia for graduate school a couple of years earlier. The relocation was a shock. Suddenly she realized that a Berkeley childhood and four years at Yale had given her a slightly skewed perspective on the American religious landscape. Evangelicalism wasn’t a weird local aberration after all; secular America was actually “limited real estate on the vast territory controlled by Christians.”

She decided to investigate that vast territory as an insider. “I wanted to know what my evangelical neighbors were like as people …. I wanted to try to take them on their own terms,” she writes. “I felt I needed to go unnoticed if I was going to get an authentic understanding.” So she went to Thomas Road, pretending to be a new convert, and spent nearly a year living as an undercover atheist. Unbelieving, she was baptized. (The water was cold, and her mascara ran.) Unbelieving, she took the Lord’s Supper. (“I was hungry. Is it wrong to think of this as a refreshment?”) Unbelieving, she went on a mission trip to Alaska and led a little girl through the sinner’s prayer.

That’s a lot of effort, but Welch was driven by a sense of mission, determined to break through the stereotypes and explain to the world that evangelicals aren’t really all that scary after all. In the Land of Believers, the story of the months she spent as a member of Thomas Road, is her manifesto.

“My hope for this book,” Welch writes on her website, “is that it will provide readers with a vivid portrayal of evangelical hearts and minds to eclipse the old, broad caricatures.” By the end of her sojourn, she has developed an affection for her NASCAR-loving, gun-toting, fry-eating evangelical friends—an affection she recommends to her secular compatriots. In the Land of Believers concludes with this earnest plea:

If we don’t love Evangelicals, if we don’t make an effort to understand and accept them, to eat the fish even as it wriggles in our hands, we’ll always be each other’s nemeses. We’ll always be trying to drown each other out. Threaten them, ridicule them, celebrate their humiliation, and you create a toxic dump, fertile ground for a ferocious adversary to rise, again and again. But listen to them, include them in the public conversation, understand the sentiments behind their convictions, and you invent the possibility of kinship.

Apart from the creepy and inexplicable metaphor, this sounds good—until you realize that “understand the sentiments behind their convictions” is exactly what Welch means. She may claim to be portraying the evangelical mind, but her entire narrative is marked by a determined refusal to comprehend that there is one.

“[H]ow was I to find a place among people indifferent to facts?”, Welch writes in her introduction. It is an opinion that never shifts a millimeter. Listening to Jerry Falwell preach about the offense of the cross, she muses: “By embracing the inscrutable cross, Christians were comfortable not fully comprehending the concepts around which they built their lives.” Christian beliefs bypass the brain altogether; the whole notion of the Trinity, she remarks, “reminded me of nothing more than Dracula’s ability to transmute into a bat or mist.” She is tone-deaf to conviction, unable to comprehend that doctrine has anything to do with the behavior of the people she claims to love.

Which is simpler for her, because she can blame everything she dislikes about evangelicals on cultural influence, and cultivate her affection for them without having to think about what they actually believe. “I expected to go in as a sort of anthropologist,” she writes at the end of her experiment:

I expected to discover the sociological underpinnnings for evangelical wackiness. I never imagined that I would feel a kind of belonging. Because beyond basically appreciating my friends as fellow human beings, I finally understood what it felt like to believe you knew something that had the power to improve the lives of others. You felt compelled to share it. And whose fault was their ignorance? It was hard to blame them entirely.

The answer to the rhetorical question is, apparently, the South. In Welch’s world, Christians have “violently side-parted” hair, buckle their belts under ponderous bellies, think airplane travel is exotic, and leave lousy tips. “Could I be a Christian woman to a Christian man?”, she wonders, considering what it would be like to be a real evangelical instead of the undercover atheist variety. “Could I hold his hand and my zipper-bagged Bible as we hurried into church together? Could I look at him across a basket of bottomless fries and be content?”

The answer, predictably, is no. “I preferred analysis, reason, and the satisfying realism of hard truths,” she concludes, heading back towards her secular life. But she’s fairly sure that, one day, her evangelical friends will wipe the grease off their fingers and follow her. Chronicling a heated discussion about the emergent church among her Thomas Road friends, she predicts that resistance to the movement will inevitably crumble in time: “The emerging church was the future for born-agains, as it acknowledged that Christians needed to mold to the shape of the world–not the other way around. Signs of hope were everywhere.”

That’s a staggeringly stupid thing for anyone who claims to understand evangelicalism to write, but Welch is unable to believe that people she likes could really hold well-thought-out, strongly held beliefs that she finds repellent. (“If somehow Evangelicals were forced to co-exist with gay people,” she suggests brightly, “Evangelicals would eventually learn that their ideas about gayness were wrong.”) Ultimately, Welch is able to love evangelicals because she finds their identity in their culture, which spares her from having to cope with stubborn things like belief.

At the end of In the Land of Believers, Welch quotes a commencement address by David Foster Wallace, in which Wallace recommends that his listeners cultivate peace with others by choosing to see “the mystical oneness of all things deep down …. Not that the mystical stuff is true. The only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.” This, Welch explains, became “the basis of my love for Evangelicals: I was going to choose to see the mystical oneness. And once I started to see it that way, loving them wasn’t very hard to do.” Loving them while grappling with the reality of their beliefs might be a little bit harder.

Despite its many failings, In the Land of Believers demonstrates just how illusory our peace with the secular world can be. I don’t wear my pants too low (in part because I give the bottomless fries a miss) or speak with a banjo twang; I rack up my share of frequent-flyer miles, wear black when I’m in New York, and leave decent tips. In my professional world, I go undercover just as effectively as Welch did at Thomas Road. The people I work with know I’m a Christian, but I don’t look blue-collar Virginia.

Welch’s book reminds me that this probably allows my colleagues to forget about the awkward beliefs I hold. If I spoke of the Trinity, of Christ, of sin and atonement—and if they listened—I suspect that the result would not be love and mystical acceptance. It would be appalled surprise, followed by rapid retreat.

Susan Wise Bauer is the author most recently of The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (Norton), the second installment in a projected four-volume history of the world.

This is very timely since the modern, popular perceptions of Christian origins are pretty one-sided. Early Christianity is poorly understood (embarrassingly) and under valued in our churches, and this ignorance is very easy to capitalize on (enter Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan). I hope that in endowing this chair that perhaps it might prompt GCTS to require a class on early Christianity for Master of Divinity students beyond the 2 church history classes.  Don’t forget to listen to the interview below.

Donald M. Fairbairn, Ph.D., has been appointed to the newly endowed Robert E. Cooley Chair in Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, effective fall 2010.

Since 1999, Dr. Fairbairn has taught at Erskine Theological Seminary in Due West, SC, most recently as Professor of Historical Theology. While there, he taught courses including historical and patristic theology and church history. Dr. Fairbairn also taught for several years at Donetsk Christian University in the Ukraine, and he teaches occasionally at several North American and European seminaries and Bible schools. He has authored books in Russian and English, most recently, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers, and has written many articles and book reviews on patristics, Eastern Orthodoxy and Christology. He holds an M.Div. from Denver Seminary and a Ph.D. in patristics from the University of Cambridge.

“Dr. Fairbairn brings expertise in the patristic period, expertise rarely found in evangelical institutions of higher learning,” says Dr. Timothy Laniak, Dean of the Charlotte campus of Gordon-Conwell. “As a noted scholar and excellent communicator, he will provide reliable information about these controversial centuries to students and the broader public and will play a strategic role in the development of the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity, a Center devoted to exploring the historical foundations of the Christian faith.”

The Robert E. Cooley Chair in Early Christianity is an endowed faculty chair that provides Gordon-Conwell and the wider community in the Southeast with a senior scholar in the area of patristics and historical theology. This chair will allow the seminary to contribute careful scholarship to the growing interest in the early church.

Source: www.gcts.edu